GDPR updates to IBM Analytics Engine

In consideration of GDPR regulations, IBM has made changes to the IBM Analytics Engine Cloud Service to provide improved security and compliance readiness, and needs you to take certain actions to include those changes as part of your applications. All customers are required to do this irrespective of their geography, or the type of data they analyze using IBM Analytics Engine.

IBM will be making these updates to the service at the backend and not directly into running clusters. In order for your IBM Analytics Engine clusters to pick up the updates, you need to delete existing instances and create new instances of the service. You can do this using the IBM Cloud console or through the CLI. Please refer to the IBM Analytics Engine documentation, for help with creating clusters. Before deleting a cluster, please ensure that any data in the cluster is copied over to IBM Cloud Object Storage and metadata, configuration scripts and other application artifacts are backed up. You may use the IBM Cloud Object Storage to store a backup of these artifacts.

We strongly recommend that all customers delete existing instances and create new ones prior to the date GDPR goes into effect, May 25, 2018, so your use of the service will be GDPR ready.

For any additional help on this topic, please feel free to reach out through the IBM Cloud support center.
For more information about GDPR, please visit www.ibm.com/gdpr.

IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service will soon increase your cluster availability by adding replicas of the Kubernetes master with fix pack version 1.11.3_1531, released on November 1, 2018. After you update, clusters will have three Kubernetes master replicas that you set up with a highly available (HA) configuration.

In view of these value-driven changes to IBM Analytics clusters, we encourage you to create new clusters, especially if you are still using clusters created before August 17, 2018, as these clusters do not include any of the latest updates. Before you delete your old clusters, you should back up your data, metadata, and any changes done on the clusters so that no data is lost.

As part of our drive to deliver improvements to the Voice Agent with Watson service, we are making changes in October around how we handle transferring calls and updating the pricing for the Voice Agent service.